Undergraduates at Tulane don’t wait to start putting their academics to work.

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Undergraduates at Tulane don’t wait to start putting their academics to work. Take this team of biomedical engineering majors. They invented a new tool for diagnosing malaria that can detect the disease simply by examining the retina of the eye. This represents an innovative alternative to current detection methods, which are inconvenient, expensive, and require a diagnostic expert.

The design earned the team a $2,500 award in the 2010 BME Start Competition run by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance for Technology. They have filed a patent and will use their winnings to continue developing the tool for market.

Associate Professor David Rice, center, with two members of his team of biomedical engineering students who won national recognition in the BME Start Competition. Pictured with Rice are students Xun “Michael” Liu, left, and Joseph Majdi, right. Not pictured: Donald Campbell, Alison Douglas, John Huck, and Austin Dobbins. (Photo by Paula Burch-Celentano)